The boy band recently dished to MTV News about their upcoming summer tour, and told us that while they certainly aren’t newbies when it comes to the road, their experience means they feel ready for anything. In 2011 and 2012, they went on massive tours with New Kids on the Block, and those jaunts were something like a traveling pop wolf pack.

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“We just finished a tour with nine of us,” A.J. McLean said of the NKTOTBSB run, adding that for the new tour, Pauly D being on the lineup ensures there will be “lots of fist pumping going on.”

The In a World Like This Tour
celebrates the boy band’s 20-year anniversary and kicks off August 2 in Chicago. It will cross North America for five weeks before wrapping up September 8 in San Francisco.

“We’re excited [because] we actually worked with Jesse before,” Nick Carter said of McCartney, who opened for the guys on their Never Gone Tour in 2005. “We had a great time with him and, obviously, the relationship has stood.”

“And Pauly D has a great fanbase. Now it’ll be Double Ds, between me and him, on the road,” Howie D joked.

Just days before the tour kicks off on July 30, the band will release their album, In a World Like This.
(Their upcoming single, which shares its title with the tour and LP, drops on June 25.) The fivesome admitted that whittling down two decades of music, while still incorporating new tracks, is proving to be a challenge.

“The thing about the tour is we have 20 years’ worth of music to celebrate with our fans, so that’s going to be cool,” said Kevin Richardson, who returned to the group
last year. “But we also have an album that we’re very proud of, [and] we want to share some of that new music with them live, so we’re going to have a combo of both. And we’re going to be bringing back some of the old moves.”

Backstreet may have also worked out a system to guarantee everyone goes home happy each night.

“What we’re thinking about doing — Howie brought up a great idea — is like almost having a wild-card song,” Richardson explained. “So every night, every show, we’ll maybe have a list to choose from. And I don’t know how [the fans] can do this, maybe they can tweet it. It would be almost like ‘Wheel of Fortune’ or you spin the wheel [to choose a song]. Every night, it kind of rotates ’cause inevitably we’re going to leave out something the fans want to hear. But every night they’ll have a shot to hear [it].”